Köýtendag

The Other Turkmenistan

By the time I reached Köýtendag in the country’s far eastern corner — bordering Uzbekistan and Afghanistan — I had revised my mental model of the country three times already. The Karakum Desert is the dominant geography in the imagination, and it’s real, but it is not the whole story. The Köýtendag range, part of the Kugitang system, rises to over 3,000 meters in a landscape of limestone karst, pine-covered slopes, and seasonal streams that you would not believe belongs to the same country as the marble boulevards of Ashgabat.

Getting here from the capital is a commitment: a flight to Türkmenabat (the nearest major city), then several hours of driving east. The distances in Turkmenistan are Texan-scale — the country is roughly the size of California — and the eastern regions see almost no international visitors. Our driver pointed out a few other vehicles during the entire two-day journey into the reserve. Most of them appeared to be military.

The Dinosaur Plateau

The signature feature of Köýtendag that most people have heard of — if they’ve heard of it at all — is the dinosaur trackway on the limestone plateau above the main valley. These are genuine Jurassic-era tracks, preserved in the limestone surface, primarily sauropod and theropod: the long oval depressions of large four-legged animals and the narrower three-toed marks of bipedal predators. There are reportedly over 400 individual tracks across the site.

What struck me was not the number but the depth. Some of these impressions are 15 to 20 centimeters deep, which tells you something about the weight of the animals that made them. I stepped into one of the larger depressions experimentally and it came up past my ankle. The limestone surface around the tracks is weathered and cracked, and you have to look carefully to distinguish the anthropogenic damage (visitors who shouldn’t have been walking there) from the geological record. Both, unfortunately, are present.

Umbar Dere Canyon

The canyon is Köýtendag’s second major spectacle: a narrow limestone gorge where a stream cuts through the plateau and drops in a series of small waterfalls into pools of genuinely clear water. In a country where most landscapes are brown and flat and dry, the shock of encountering running water, shade, and wet moss is almost comically intense.

Lia waded into one of the lower pools in her clothes without hesitation. I understood the impulse entirely. The water was cold and smelled of stone and we stayed longer than our schedule required, eating lunch on a flat rock beside the falls, listening to a sound Turkmenistan had not previously offered us.

Karlyuk Cave System

The Karlyuk cave system is one of the longest in Central Asia — the explored portion runs to several kilometers, and speleologists believe the full extent is considerably greater. The show cave section is accessible with a guide and involves some scrambling but no specialized equipment. The formations are genuinely impressive: stalactites and stalagmites in chambers large enough to dwarf the visitors, some formations with the particular translucency that indicates slow mineral deposition over extraordinary timescales.

The darkness underground, when the guide extinguishes the lamp as a demonstration, is absolute in a way that indoor darkness never is. It has weight.

When to go: May through early July and September through October. The waterfalls are at their best in spring when snowmelt feeds the streams. Summer in the canyon is cool relative to the rest of the country. Avoid the plateau in high summer heat and check snow conditions before winter visits — the mountain roads can close.